Ferrite is a type of compounds usually composed of iron oxide and one or more additional metal oxides chemically. These compounds are ferromagnetic, meaning they can be magnetized by or attracted to a magnet, and therefore have broad applications in electronic inductors, transformers, electromagnets, and data storage. Nanosized ferrite particles have even broader application potentials mostly due to their unique size-dependent magnetic properties, which make them widely used in areas in addition to the afore-mentioned, such as magnetic separation, environmental remediation, magnetic data recording, magnetic thermal fluids, drug delivery, hyperthermia therapy, and magnetic resonance imaging. The existing synthesis methods involve complicated procedures and use special metal precursors, or the need to convert precursors to required intermediates. For example, one method requires making metal oleate salts (or in general, metal carboxylate salts) from the reaction of selected metal oxides and oleic acid at high temperature (Chem. Commun. 2004, 2306-2307; Nat. Mater. 2004, 3, 891-895.); another method uses Fe(CO)5 as the starting material for Fe2O3 and Fe3O4 nanoparticle synthesis (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2001, 123, 12798.). Some researchers use co-precipitation of FeCl2 and FeCl3 in water with bases. This co-precipitation usually produces wider size distribution of the particle sizes.